[Continuing our series on Bad Guys in film and fiction … ] The villain believes in a world of scarce resources and a competition of all against all. As the villain sees it, the human race inhabits a post-Edenic cosmos, i.e. a universe in which all of us have been kicked out of the Garden (where our needs were provided for in abundance) and are condemned for ever after to scuffle for a living out here on the mean streets. Or, as the tribesmen of Pashtunistan might phrase it, I against my brother; my brother and I against our cousin;…

With the exception of a few long-distance glimpses of tribal Arab wives and mothers ululating in valediction as their husbands and sons ride off to war (and a quick peek or two at be-jeweled feminine hands extending from beneath side-curtains in camel-borne covered conveyances), there are no female characters in Lawrence of Arabia. Or are there? I would make the case that the female in Lawrence is the desert. As we wrote in an earlier “Female Carries the Mystery” post: The desert is remote and mysterious. It is timeless, eternal. In the world of the Bedouin the desert is the…

  The last thing I do before closing my eyes to sleep is to mentally prepare myself for the fight tomorrow. How easy it is, congratulating yourself after a productive today, to talk yourself into slacking off tomorrow. The first post in this series was titled RESISTANCE WAKES UP WITH ME. It does, and I know it. Resistance will hit me tomorrow morning before I even open my eyes. It will try to turn my success today into failure tomorrow. Resistance will try to convince me I can relax, ease up. “You put a good day in the bank today. Enjoy…

I’m not joking when I say I do some of my best work in bed. In the middle of the night. Something about that twilight stage of consciousness when we’re not awake but not asleep either. Why do ideas come to us in the shower, or where we’re shaving or driving on the freeway and hanging onto a strap in the subway? Those too are twilight states. They are “gateway stages” when the membrane is down and insights can bubble up from the Muse’s secret sanctuary. The ego, I believe, is the generator of Resistance. So when the ego is…

A few years ago when I was researching my WWII book Killing Rommel, I immersed myself in reading about a British commando unit called the Long Range Desert Group. Have you heard of these guys? They fought behind the lines against Rommel and the German Afrika Korps. Their vehicles were civilian Chevy “hundredweights,” i.e. ton-and-a-half pickups. Into these they packed fuel, water, weapons, navigation gear, and spare parts. Their theater of war was the North African desert. In patrols of six to eleven trucks they routinely ventured a thousand miles from the nearest aid to work “beat-ups” on Axis airfields…

With special thanks to our good friend Joe Jansen, who sent me this poem, and to the website Science and Nonduality where it appeared … here is “Pandemic” by San Francisco poet Lynn Ungar, www.lynnungar.com.   Pandemic   What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down.   And when your body has become still, reach…